Startup Canada and Launch Academy develop program to help entrepreneurs

Startup Canada and Launch Academy develop program to help entrepreneurs

Vancouver-based incubator Launch Academy announced a partnership with Startup Canada to help Canadian entrepreneurs prevent common mistakes as they build their early-stage ventures.

The two institutions are teaming up to launch LEAP Online, an online course designed to help entrepreneurs validate their ideas in a more scientific way. LEAP Online is the online version of Launch Academy’s Lean Entrepreneur Acceleration Program (LEAP), which, over the past three years, has graduated more than 200 aspiring entrepreneurs in Vancouver. The Next Big Thing, a charitable organization co-founded by Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes and serial entrepreneur Mereditch Powell, also runs their cohort of young entrepreneurs through LEAP.

“After mentoring 1,000 entrepreneurs and incubating more than 400 startups, we realized that most entrepreneurs make the same expensive mistakes,” said Alex Chuang, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Launch Academy. “And what we have discovered was a lot of these common mistakes can be easily prevented if entrepreneurs know how to design and conduct meaningful startup experiments. That is why we have condensed all of our learnings in the past four years into this online course so anyone can learn how to build a startup from anywhere.”